My
immediate reaction when I first read the abstract for
the Strategies of (In)Visibility conference was a
certain discomfort. I should immediately try to clarify
the reasons for such a feeling. It had nothing to do
with the contents or the style of the abstract itself,
but with a kind of echo, an irrational déjà-vu
coming from the past. Somehow I could not suppress the
reflex of rejection towards the main topic of the
conference. This initial discomfort forced me to tackle
the fact of refraining from discussing politics and the
political implications of artistic practices. It became
obvious to me, that this rejection or abjection was
mainly the result of my upbringing in a communist
country.

With this
essay, I want to suggest that this abhorrence to discuss
politics in the context of post-socialist countries
with one party system contributes to this debate about
(in)visibility. The reason I find this visceral rejection
that verges on the abject to be relevant is not simply
because I was born and educated in such a system, it
is also because the artists whose art I am going to
discuss later, started working in similar circumstances.
More precisely, my paper will deal with the art that
was produced in a period of transition, at the time
of the shift from socialist to post-socialist societies
in the ex-Yugoslav countries. I will try to shed some
light on that period by first making a difference not
between art, activism and these protagonists strategies
towards (in)visibility, but between art that is about
the political and art that enters and functions within
the realm of the political. In fact, even activists
projects can take part in discussions about the political
without actually transforming the political and vice
versa, art projects can enter and transform the political
sphere.

Making
visible the political

Instead
of discussing the work of artists that chose anonymity
because of their fear for the success of their activities
e. g. making visible the invisible as the title and
the abstract of the conference suggest, I have chosen
to discuss the issue of making visible the political
as such. This is something that art dealing with political
issues, art acting from within the political and activism
have all in common as their starting aim. From this
perspective, the difference between pure art and engaged
art becomes less relevant, and here I refer to the recent
discussions on the politics of aesthetics in the context
of Jacques Ranciere’s writing.[1]
In order to clarify the phenomenon of rejection from
the political I experienced, I need to unearth where
this political abject comes from. To do so, I will need
to go back to the 1980s and refer to the now non-existent
cultural and political geography of ex-Yugoslavia.

Let me
first mention that the original theoretical context
of the term abject, was defined by Julia Kristeva in
her book The Powers
of Horror. For her, the abject has religious roots
and it is mainly about a form of primal repression and
transgression. She writes: "Discomfort, unease,
dizziness, stemming from an ambiguity that through the
violence of a revolt against, demarcates a space out
of which signs and objects arise."[2]
However, for Kristeva, the effects of abjection can
only lead to the constitution of ones own culture: "The
abject is the border, not me, not that not nothing either.
A something that cannot be recognised as thing, A weight
of meaningless, on the edge of non-existence and hallucination,
of reality that if I acknowledge it annihilates me.
There, abject and abjection are my safeguards; the primers
of my culture."[3]
The political abject in ex-communist countries was definitely
the primer of one’s own culture for one’s
feeling of discomfort from political culture. It was
the only alternative so that these two were not to be
mixed. As with any of the food mixing taboos that Kristeva
speaks about, if the mixture between politics and culture
would have taken place, the loathing was the only final
result.

I am not
sure whether Kristeva would agree with the idea of taking
the abject out of its original context and applying
it in a political context, but the fact that she never
wrote an explicit book dealing with her Bulgarian past
can make one think that this was after all a possible
result of a similar rejection on the verge of abjection
of the experience of the political in her youth. (She
did address the political, though, in Strangers
to Ourselves and when writing on the political thinker
Hannah Arendt).

That is
one of the possible answers to the question why artists
in the East have still not delved in the possibilities
offered by activist artistic practices. In the late
80s and at the beginning of the 90s, there was hardly
any art in East Europe that was not dealing with the
political issues of the dissolution of communist states.
It was during that time, that the political became visible
(in contrast to the clandestine art practices from the
previous periods when even abstract art had a certain
political meaning). However, this resurgence of interest
in the political is not the same as to say that these
artists were activists. Even though now there are already
few artists and art groups that are just starting to
enter the realm of agitation and activism, the activists
groups exist in a much larger extent (during the 2003
elections in Macedonia there were 160 NGOs and they
all entered an association supporting the coalition
of two parties that won the elections and now rules
the country at the moment).

Positionalities

In the
80s in ex-Yugoslavia, there was not much choice of different
political positions for intellectuals, artists, writers
and other professionals who were not convinced by the
communist party programme. However, three main different
options could be distinguished and all of them were
necessarily unofficial, illegal or oppositional: One
could completely distance oneself from the only official
political party and secretly boast ones non-belonging
status (unless the membership card would have accidentally
dropped out from his/her purse). Even though in the
80s (especially after Yugoslavia’s leader Tito’s
death in 1981) some of the writers being members of
the communist party, would be writing journalist comments
with titles such as Who is not with us is against us, to be active intellectually and
yet not to be a member was possible and even popular.
Moreover, party members were despised and isolated by
the inoperative intellectual communities and were forced
to socialise among them. The second possibility was
the preserve of the most courageous. One could belong
to, at first clandestine but very soon openly publicised,
nationalist movements. The nationalists were already
publicly visible and audible in the 80s but their activities
were not legalised. Very soon in the late 90s the different
nationalist oppositions in the different republics incited
the split of Yugoslavia and the ethnic conflicts resulting
with most horrible local wars. These two different positions
were not isolated from each other, though. One could
be a member of the communist party and yet be a nationalist,
or boast to have an apolitical past and still be a secret
member of the party. In fact, the latter was the most
ambivalent position available - being a communist party
member but remaining non-active in public, belonging
without belonging. Being after the easy access to power
(guaranteed were not only small privileges but the membership
was required for any university or managerial position)
and yet criticising it was a kind of simulated opposition
and it was seen as the worst hypocrisy. Although from
today’s perspective, this sounds as a fake opposition
it was not that innocent or safe. If a clandestine member
would have been discovered, there was no turning back
to the intellectual flock and this ambivalence would
have ended with being persecuted by both cheated sides.

This popular
position was perhaps the most comfortable one, but it
could not last for long. I want to argue that even today
this intertwinement of different political positions
continues today in all countries that emerged after
the dissolution of ex-Yugoslavia, an intertwinement
that makes problematic the engagements within the realm
of politics. The parties were changing their names and
leaders, members were fluctuating from one party to
another and they still do. The non-governmental organisations
are pretty much involved in this chaotic wannabe democracy.
Many things did change after the war conflicts and the
need to question and re-position ones own attitude towards
the political after the conflicts inevitably popped
up. However, the political ambivalence from the past
mixed up with the political awakening of the present,
resulted with a very specific political scene.

Change
of languages

Today,
and not only in the East, it becomes almost impossible
to tell the right from the left, the democratic from
the conservative, or the nationalist from the fundamentalist.
Such entangled political positions seem to have reflected
directly onto the art scene and with artists. How can
we expect the artists and activists dealing with political
issues to be consequential in their addressing something
that is not consequential as such. If the political
arena changes its language, artists will inevitably
begin to deal with these issues or even more when functioning
in the political framework they need to change the language,
not necessarily meaning that they will have to mime
it. The example of the Slovenian art group IRWIN, a
part of the NSK movement established in 1983 and later
re-named NSK State, can serve as the best example of
such a need for changing the language of art and its
relation to reality.

In this
context, I want to evoke the case of the most renowned
intellectual from ex-Yugoslavia the Slovenian philosopher
Slavoj Zizek who underwent a similar political context
in the early stage of his career (and whose name is
linked with the activities of NSK and Laibach,
the music group part of NSK). In 1976, he published
his book Sign,
Signifier, Letter both in Slovenian and Croatian.
With this book, he started the first serious reception
of psychoanalysis in Yugoslavia. However, with this
book, it was almost impossible to anticipate the political
application of psychoanalysis of Zizek’s later
texts. The book deals with a very complex reading of
Lacan linking psychoanalysis and the Borromean knots
and entanglements between the order of the real, imaginary
and symbolic with contemporary philosophical interpretations
of Hegel and Kant. However, there were no references
to concrete events and persons from daily life in Yugoslavia
and psychoanalytical plays with any political or social
issues, the style of writing that later put Zizek in
focus on the international intellectual scene.

Even though
in some texts the psychoanalytical concept of the Law
of the Father could have been read as the political
figure of Tito, this would have been deliberately left
ungrounded in the texts. It was not until the late eighties
and early nineties when Zizek started writing his famous
essays on film. He then first embarked on his cultural
crusade focusing instead on a completely philosophical
discourse. Interestingly enough, at the very same time,
in 1990, he became the official Liberal
Democratic Party candidate for Presidency of the
Republic of Slovenia. The famous essay Why
are Laibach and NSK not Fascists? that Zizek wrote
in 1993 about the Slovenian music group Laibach
and the phenomenon of the artists collective NSK was
the first text that tried to explain the NSK phenomenon
which started in 1984 when three groups that were established
in 1983 (the music band Laibach, the five art member
collective IRWIN and the theatre Gledalizce
Sestre Scipion Nasice) gathered under the same name
NSK (Neue Slowenische
Kunst).[4]

What most
deeply holds together a community is not so much identification
with the Law that regulates the community's "normal"
everyday circuit, but rather identification with a specific
form of transgression of the Law, of the Law's suspension
(in psychoanalytic terms, with a specific form of enjoyment).
He then gives as an example, the enjoyment of Ku Klux
Klan’s secret enjoyment of torturing their black
victims.[5]
In fact, I would suggest that a similar enjoyment was
shared in the ex-Yugoslavia among intellectuals and
artists who did not accept to get involved in the country’s
political life, solidarity-in-guilt adduced by participation
in a common transgression of the communist rules.

This uneasy
feeling is fed on the assumption that ironic distance
is automatically a subversive attitude. What if, on
the contrary, the dominant attitude of the contemporary
"post-ideological" universe is precisely the
cynical distance toward public values? What if this
distance, far from posing any threat to the system,
designates the supreme form of conformism, since the
normal function of the system requires cynical distance?
In this sense the strategy of Laibach
appears in a new light: it "frustrates" the
system (the ruling ideology) precisely insofar as it
is not its ironic imitation, but over-identification
with it - by bringing to light the obscene superego
underside of the system, over-identification suspends
its efficiency.[6]
By using the Althusserian model of ideological state
apparatus, Zizek calls for an interpretation of Laibach
and NSK that remained as a kind of starting reference
for each reading of the practice of this phenomenon.

Staged
dangerous liaisons

One thing
that Zizek gets right (there are many discrepancies
and contra-dictions in his text and in later texts that
can be found on various projects of NSK and Laibach
performances) is that there was mostly no life/death
threat for either the state or for intellectual and
art projects. They were often regarded as harmless or
simply overlooked by the communist party. The story
of the Day of
Youth poster scandal from 1986/1987 when New Collectivism design group (the sub-group of NSK which consisted
of some members of Laibach, IRWIN and the theatre collective
Gledalizce Sestre
Scipion Nasice), through a strange succession of
events, caused a real confusion between the art and
political world, shows exactly the fragility of the
claim of danger and threat for art entering politics.
The scandal aroused when a New
Collectivism’s poster that won the first prize
in the national competition and was already distributed
for the Day of
Youth (Tito’s official birthday that was celebrated
each 25th May along Yugoslavia) was withdrawn when the
authorities were warned that it showed the proximity
between socialist realism and Nazi Kunst (the poster
was actually a re-design of a Nazi poster by Richard
Klein from the 1930s, an obvious, but indistinguishable
fact for the jury). Following the scandal that indirectly
connected communism with fascism the yearly ritual of
celebrating Tito’s birthday was abolished, but
yet nobody was imprisoned or tortured, unless you did
not count the endless interviews with the members of
Laibach on the State TV or in the magazines in which
the journalists repeated asking similar questions to
the one that was on everybody’s mind: But are
you fascists, are you really fascists?[7]

Therefore
the invisibility entertained as a deliberate artistic
practice from its start is paradoxical - it cannot be
a strategy that is forced to artists for protection
of their integrity or for guarding their ideas from
the centres of power. In contrast to some risky art
actions and concepts that put their authors in a real
danger there is also often a kind of hidden agenda among
artists or wannabe activists: it is often hypocritically
pre-calculated and aims to use the energy of curiosity
and expectation from the viewers. I want to critically
reflect on certain artists and especially art groups
that flirt with these strategies in order to acquire
the desired attention. Once they are ready to reveal
the clandestine identities of the individual members
of the group, previously kept hidden under the excuse
of a hypothetic danger, they expose their strategy and
enable the questioning of its ingenuity. This paradox
can be explored through the case of the Slovenian art
collective IRWIN from the start of their career, or
through the case of Zampa di Leone (still unknown author(s)
of an art web site from Serbia and Montenegro) as some
of the most relevant examples of such an investment
in invisibility as a process that leads towards an inevitably
fast success.

Zampa di
Leone’s In
the Arse of the Balkan 2000-2005 comic strip web
site both jokes with artists including the most renowned
artists and projects such as successful IRWIN’s
group recent projects, the artists Tanja Ostojic, Milica
Tomic and Uros Djuric, and the curators Marina Grzinic
and Branko Dimitrijevic and aims to a cultural critique
of the representation of the Balkan art scene in a Western
art context. Their graphic drawings and language aims
to be a kind of subversive activism but there is definitely
a certain ambiguity in Zampa di Leone’s attitude
towards activism. Although they state: In the Arse
of the Balkan "is dealing with the phenomenon
of cultural activism and artistic practices in the West
Balkan region and Europe in the last half of decade"[8], their ironical approach
towards activism becomes clear through other texts.
However, according to the clandestine author the web
site will fulfil its mission with any change of in the
local situation and the notion of change is definitely
an attribute closely related with that of activism.
It is obvious that the target of this project is not
the political in general but the art politics of the
Serbian and Balkan art scene.

The question
here is whether the anonymity of the artist was really
necessary and what is the danger that could harm either
the project or the artist behind it. Obviously, there
is only one danger that can be detected in this case,
the one of not including the project within the kind
of exhibitions that were already highly criticised in
the comic strips by the author. Should we believe the
artists claim that there have been already 10.000 visitors
to the web site: perhaps none of the criticised exhibitions
had such a big audience. However, any kind of judgment
or justification of the effects of this ambivalent strategy
is difficult and problematic.

This acted
dissident-ship among artists is a renowned phenomenon
in East Europe that resulted from the complex cultural
conditions during the communist and post-communist periods
when the distinction between the real and staged danger
was difficult to make. The renowned Ranciere’s
statement that political art is always a kind of specific
negotiation not between politics and art but between
the two politics of aesthetics- or the Deleuzian claim that an important characteristic
of minor literatures is that everything in them is political
was the best experience among artists in Eastern Europe.
Whether abstract or realistic, any art by non communist
artists could be interpreted as against the communist
programme, an interpretation that sounds very similar
to that of "Who is not with us is against us".

Paradoxically
enough, the troubles with the political continued after
the dissolution of communism. However now, the protagonists
of the politicisation of art come from the West. During
the first years of transition only political art was
acceptable if it come from the East. At the moment,
while it seems that politically engaged art is now easier
to accept for the local art scene, activist art becomes
on the contrary more prominent in international art
circles. The transformations of the art language changed
not only in the realm of the language in general, but
also between language and reality. Still it is difficult
to make a clear distinction between the two oppositions
- the language of art about the political and the language
of art that acts within the political. The paradoxes
that stem out of local circumstances actually blur this
basic difference. It is only recently that few artists
in Slovenia: Apolonija Custeric and Tadej Pogacar, in
Croatia: Andreja Kujuncic and group Platforma,
or Tanja Ostojic started working in the realm of the
political thus changing again the language of art and
thus overcoming the old feeling of abjection that resulted
from ones involvement in the realm of the political.

Under the straightforward plot of modernity and postmodernity
or the clear-cut opposition of pure art and engaged
art, we have to recognise the original and enduring
tension of those two politics of aesthetics, which are
entailed in the very forms of visibility and intelligibility
that make art identifiable as such to us - those two
politics which are led ultimately to their own self-suppression.
It is that tension which underpins and somehow undermines
the seemingly simple project of a political or "critical"
art that would serve politics by arousing the awareness
of the forms of domination and enhancing thereby energies
of resistance or rebellion. That simple project has
been taken up from the beginning in the tension between
the two opposite politics: art suppressing itself in
order to become life and art doing politics on the condition
of doing no politics at all.